As the school of St. Martin rose in celebrity, it became the resort of a crowd both of foreigners and natives. Alcuin’s own countrymen in particular flocked around him, and it would seem that the number of English scholars who constantly arrived, at last excited the jealousy of the clergy of Tours. One day as four Frankish priests were standing at the gate of the monastery, a newly arrived Englishman, Aigulf by name, passed in, and supposing him to be ignorant of their language, one of them exclaimed, “There goes another of them! When shall we be free from these swarms of Britons? They gather round the old fellow like so many bees!” Aigulf hung his head and blushed; but when Alcuin heard what had passed he sent for the Frenchmen, and courteously requested them to sit down, and drink the health of the young scholar in his best wine. “The old Saxon,” as they called him, ceased not in his retirement to watch over the interests of learning, even in the remotest provinces. There was hardly a bishop or abbot of any distinction who had not at one time or other been his pupil, and he continued to enjoy and exercise among them the privileged freedom of an old and honoured master. His letters bear evidence of the immense range over which his influence extended. In his ninety-fourth epistle he conjures a young missionary to be always reminding the parish priests to keep up their schools. Another time he addresses a bishop, and advises him to return to his own country that he may set in order good grammar lessons for the children of his diocese. His fifty-sixth letter is to the English Archbishop of York; and in it he enters into several useful details; and advises him to have his school divided into different classes--one for reading, one for writing, and one for chanting, so as to preserve good order. Then comes a letter to the Emperor, reminding him to have the Palatine scholars daily exercised in their learning; arithmetical subtleties accompany another letter, and some sage observations on the utility of punctuation, which commendable branch of grammar has, he regrets to say, been of late much lost sight of. In short, his active mind, thoroughly Anglo-Saxon in its temper, worked on to the end; labouring at a sublime end by homely practical details. One sees he is of the same race with Bede, who wrote and dictated to the last hour of his life, and when his work was finished, calmly closed his book and died.